Of all the poems I could write today,
one about a cat gazing adoringly
at Dickie—as he laptops at my house
during an internet outage at his—

seems so trivial in these desperate
times of fire and flood, earthquakes
and mudslides, of so much suffering
in the world. But there is always

so much suffering in the world.
We are never short on that. And
sometimes I have to tune out
the agony of other beings and

look into the sweet eyes of one guy
staring with such devotion at
another guy taking up table space
with some electronic contraption

the first guy cannot comprehend
because Diego is—in addition to
being a cat—a classic doofus, far
from the brightest thing on four feet.

But none of that matters because
this is, it turns out, a love poem for
two guys who cherish me, and I them—
we three beings whose problems

don’t amount to a hill of beans
in this crazy world, but whose
fondness for each other makes
everything in our little orbit

that much brighter.